Provisional Schedule

Invited Speakers
Sencer Corlu (Bahcesehir University, Turkey)
Life’s your lab: Working with engineers to develop a tool for data collection and analysis at the school level
Dr Bruce Thompson would start his PhD level statistics classes at Texas A&M with a noteworthy remark: “Statistics is about thinking, understanding and communicating”. His remark was not in contradiction with my own understanding as a mathematics educator that statistics education at the school level should focus on understanding data itself, rather than using data as a means to develop procedural fluency in mathematics. From this perspective, I was content with the usual teaching practice in which students work on readily available data sets. At the end of the day, collecting data was cumbersome, technology that facilitate data collection was expensive and many times was designed for use in a lab only. At Roseta conference 2020, I would like to talk about my collaboration with a team of engineering students to develop LabStar – a data collection and analysis tool which is portable, affordable, and built on sound pedagogy. This collaboration is important because, on one hand it is unusual but necessary for educators to work with engineers to fully understand what STEM Education is and I would like to emphasize that did not happen without any challenges. On the other hand, this collaboration enabled me to understand that statistics education should be about students using their own data to think about and understand life
itself: asking their own questions and collecting data whenever and wherever their curiosity takes them. In this talk, I’ll be discussing how and why tools like LabStar should be used particularly in out of school educational contexts, such as MoMaTrE.
Helen Crompton (Old Dominion University, USA)
Contextualized Outdoor Learning: Digital Technologies Bringing Learning to Life
STEM learning is often filled with decontextualized abstract concepts. This causes a disconnect with learners who miss the relevance of the topic or just struggle as the content is not accessible. Many concepts need to be unraveled to have the students connect in meaningful ways. STEM content is about real-world phenomenon that textbooks and class activities often cannot capture. Outdoor learning allows the students to explore, examine, and understand STEM concepts through direct interactions. Digital technologies, such as mobile devices, provide a tool that can be used to optimize the learning experience. This presentation has you think about how technologies should be integrated to best use the device for learning. Frameworks, for successful integration will be presented, and learning theories, such as situated, authentic, and context aware learning will be explored with concrete examples of what they look like in practice.
Zsolt Lavicza (Johannes Kepler University, Austria)
STEAM education innovations enhancing the development of resources and pedagogies in and outside of schools
Besides tackling challenges and disruptions caused by digital technologies in education, there is also a growing emphasis for encouraging creative thinking in education, innovating pedagogies and develop connections among subjects. Utilising technologies in and outside of schools offers new opportunities to engage students learning a variety of topics, but in our case STEM-related concepts. In my talk, I will introduce ideas and examples for technological and pedagogical innovations involving STEM to STE-A-M (by the inclusion of Arts in a broader sense of creation and creativities) transitions. These examples will include STEAM research with the Experience Workshop Movement; studies related to GeoGebra and its new developments such as Augmented Reality, 3D Printing, Machine Learning and Mobile experiments; developing students’ skills through robotics and connecting digital and physical worlds. These examples could encourage the audience to further develop resources and pedagogical approaches to be utilised in and outside of classroom.